Epa Wants To Ferret Out Hidden Toxins

Industries Say Amounts Too Small To Detect

March 07, 1999|By Peter Kendall, Tribune Environment Writer.

Every day, 80 million gallons of treated waste water pours from a Bethlehem Steel Corp. plant in northwest Indiana into a tributary that feeds into Lake Michigan, and swirling in that water is an environmental quandary.

The water is plenty clean enough to comply with pollution laws, but like the treated water flowing from countless other factories, it probably contains minuscule amounts of pollutants so dangerous that the government says they are unsafe at any level.

They are among chemicals that some scientists believe are insidiously affecting human and animal life across the planet, even at excruciatingly small doses.

Because of that, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing something that might seem downright paradoxical: that plants such as Bethlehem's estimate how much of these pollutants they emit, even if they can't accurately measure them.

Recent hearings in Chicago on the subject were part of an unusual nationwide initiative to make industries accountable for these emissions.

The length to which the government is going to uncover how these hidden pollutants--including mercury and dioxin--are filtering into the environment is a measure of how seriously officials are taking the growing medical alarm. While no conclusive proof exists, many scientists think these pollutants may be tied to everything from low sperm count in men to the ghastly mutations of frog species around the world.

For dioxin, an especially persistent and dangerous pollutant, companies with yawning smokestacks and massive drain pipes would be required to make public any emissions exceeding .1 grams per year.

In practical terms, that means estimating levels of the chemicals put into the air and water based on known data about industrial processes that break down coal and other materials.

The new proposals have set off an environmental fight not about the pollution itself, but about information.

The new law would greatly expand the Toxic Release Inventory, a database created in 1986 that has become a powerful influence on policy by making information readily available about hundreds of chemicals coming from thousands of plants.

While the new proposal wouldn't directly force factories, incinerators or power plants to cut their emissions, it could make the public more aware of what's in the smoke or water at the plant across town--and that, in turn, can create pressure to clean them up or even close them.

At the Chicago hearings, environmentalists said the proposals were a good first step but don't go far enough in providing the public with information.

Industry representatives said they simply don't have the technology to make the Toxic Release Inventory reports--which now measure pollutants in tons, not pounds or grams--any more precise than they already are.

"Let me tell you, if you think that is a quantified report, you are fooling yourself," Douglas Bley, an environmental manager with Bethlehem Steel, testified at a hearing on the matter Tuesday in Chicago. "Those reports are littered with what engineers call WAGs--wild ass guesses."

The disagreement is breaking out at the very edges of science.

Researchers are just beginning to understand how some chemicals persist in living tissue, sometimes mimicking hormones that govern everything from reproduction to mental development.

Proving that, however, is difficult because the levels of these chemicals can be so low in the environment. Dioxin is believed to cause hormonal problems at levels 100 times smaller than the minuscule ones at which it can cause cancer.

The new reporting proposals--which would not impose any new limits on how much of the pollutants can be emitted--involve families of chemicals with a pernicious tendency to "bioaccumulate," building up in flesh and fat.

A fish, for example, can absorb certain pesticides from water, and the substances can accumulate in the animal's tissues until they reach concentrations that are 5,000 times greater than in the water from which they came.

Because of this, some environmentalists don't want the reporting requirements to kick in at .1 grams for dioxins or 10 pounds and 100 pounds for some other chemicals. They want the public to know when any of these "persistent bioaccumulative toxins" (PBTs) are emitted.

"We have concerns that EPA's current proposal will still allow significant amounts of dangerous PBT pollution to go unreported to the public and policymakers," testified Darren Speece of the Illinois Public Interest Research Group.

Industry claims that it doesn't have accurate information to share.

At the Bethlehem Steel plant, with its 80 million gallons of treated waste water every day, dioxin would become reportable if it were present at levels below one part per trillion, according to Bley. But the latest monitoring equipment can detect the chemical only at levels exceeding one part per trillion, Bley said.

"How am I supposed to find it?" Bley testified at the Chicago hearing. "We are beyond the analytic methods out there."